Over the last decade, our capacity to dissect out and identify different tissue-specific tumour subtypes has greatly expanded. The ability to classify tumours on their molecular and biochemical characteristics has already delivered improved prognostic models for some common tumours like breast cancers. The development of sophisticated tumour classification systems is a first step towards developing treatments which are tailored at the patient-specific level — so-called personalised medicine.

In addition, our ability to identify the small population of tumours that have arisen due to a familial genetic predisposition has fundamentally altered our approach to the identification and management of these cases. In the future, it is anticipated that germline testing for cancer pre-disposition mutations will be routinely performed in some individuals at the time of their initial diagnosis in order to estimate their risk of tumour recurrence and predict their response to therapy. In this scenario, germline genetic testing would move from the domain of a family cancer clinic to the routine clinical setting.